Traditional economic theory assumes individuals to be entirely rational actors who are solely maximizing their own utility. However, various experimental studies show that individuals do not necessarily conform to the behavioral assumption of Homo economicus. Many subjects do not solely focus on...

Politicians, CEOs and various other types of dictators make social choices that influence both their own and others' welfare. When a dictator's preferred alternative differs from recipients', it is unclear which preferences they aggregate and how they determine this set of admissible...

Utilitarianism is the most prominent family of social welfare functions. We present three new axiomatic characterizations of utilitarian (that is, additively separable) social welfare functions in a setting where there is risk over both population size and the welfares of individuals. First, we...

We study the relative risk aversion of an individual with particular social preferences: his well-being is influenced by his relative wealth, and by how concerned he is about having low relative wealth. Holding constant the individual's absolute wealth, we obtain two results. First, if the...

We test an information theory of prosocial behavior whereby ego utility and self-signaling crowd out the effect of consumption utility on choice. The data come from two field experiments involving purchases of a consumer good bundled with a charitable donation. Across experimental cells, we...

We refine the understanding of individual preferences across social lotteries, whereby the payoffs of a pair of subjects are exposed to random shocks. We find that aggregate behavior is ex-post and ex-ante inequality averse, but also that there is a wide variety of individual preferences and...

We propose and axiomatize a decision model of social preferences under risk that considers decision makers for whom generous behavior is driven largely by an egoistical desire to perceive themselves as prosocial. Our model considers a setup with a decision maker (DM) and one other individual. It...

Social lotteries are lotteries that are played along with someone else. The experimental literature indicates that risk attitudes depend on how one's situation in the safe alternative compares to that of a peer. Evaluation of the risky alternative also depends on whether the lottery gives equal...

We propose and axiomatically characterize, within Harsanyi's impartial observer setting, a utilitarian social welfare function (SWF) that can accommodate concerns for procedural fairness. Under our proposal, concerns for procedural fairness in social welfare assessments are inherited from...

We propose a democratic preference aggregation function using trapezoidal fuzzy numbers. Examples are constructed to illustrate the proposed technique to optimize the problem by avoiding paradoxical outcomes without the fear of indecision